How can I search for a file in just one specific folder in VSCode when using a workspace with multiple folders?

Question

I'm using the workspace feature of VSCode, with two projects, but it's annoying to search for a file in the front-end project and need to pass by back-end files to find the one I want.

I'm using ctrl + p to search for files.

How can I search for a file in just one folder with multiple projects opened in the workspace?

Answer 1

Yes, that's possible: use a relative path: ./mySearchedProjectName in "files to include"-input

from HERE!

Answer 2

I've found the best solution to this for me (though it's still a sub-optimal one) is simply to run multiple VS Code instances, one for each folder.

It's a pain to start up, but once you get things going (and hopefully you're not restarting often on your dev machine, so this is less of an issue) it works perfectly: you can search for files with only the relevant ones showing up.

Also, if you want to reduce the start-up pain you can make a shortcut/alias/etc. in your operating system that starts both at once.

Answer 3

UPDATED answer to UPDATED question

The fuzzy file finder (CTRL+P or ⌘+P) somehow supports prefixing the filename with a folder, such as folder/filename to locate a file from a specific folder:

But, in my experience, the search is a bit lacking. For example, I find it usually can only find files this way if that file has been recently opened in your workspace. It also does not support regex.

The best thing that can be done is to enable including recently opened files by adding this to the workspace settings:

"settings": {
    "search.quickOpen.includeHistory": true,

AFAIK, there is no other built-in way to filter the results. There are (still) open feature requests for this, like this Allow quick open to filter on folder names by typing folder name after the file. You can thumbs-up them to hopefully get them noticed.

ORIGINAL answer to ORIGINAL question

I don't know what you mean by "projects" since VS Code only has "workspaces" and "folders", such that you add folders to a workspace. I think you're already doing this, where each folder contains a separate set of codes.

With that said, the Search/Find panel has an area to specify files to include, where you can limit your search to a specific folder. For example:

Here I have 3 folders (proj 1-3) added to a workspace. I have 3 sample files with the same text.

When searching, you can set files to include to a specific folder (./proj2), so that the search results will be limited to that folder.